Nuclear weapons

This article is part of the Center for Media & Democracy's focus on the fallout of nuclear "spin."

The 166-page February 2004 report by the Defense Science Board Task Force on Future Strategic Strike Forces, the result of the DSB Summer Study 2003, recommends a nuclear payload that would shift "toward a new vision: a stockpile based on previously tested nuclear devices/designs to provide weapons more relevant to the future threat environment," i.e. nuclear weapons.

"... nuclear war-fighting doctrine began to attract the interest of specialists from outside the uniformed services. The RAND Corporation emerged as the site most suited for this type of work, and a network of analysts gravitated there. They have left an indelible stamp on America's relationship with the rest of the world.

"Together these men introduced assumptions and techniques into the study of nuclear war that resonate to this day."

A June 2, 1997, article in Forbes magazine (cache file) states that, in the late 1950s,

"At RAND the formidable strategist Albert Wohlstetter was demonstrating that in a matter of minutes Soviet short-range missiles could take out all U.S. foreign strategic air command bases encircling the Soviet Union. Then the Soviets could say stick 'em up-demanding surrender on the basis of the vulnerability of remaining U.S. missiles to superior Soviet forces. In many vivid papers and speeches, Wohlstetter relentlessly presented his argument that U.S. forces faced a 'missile gap.' The famed Alsop brothers, leading columnists of the day (Stewart was the father of the computer writer), echoed the Wohlstetter claims. [President] John F. Kennedy listened and made the gap a theme of his 1960 presidential campaign.

"Wohlstetter and his colleagues urged that the Pentagon redeploy its strategic forces to the United States and endow them with a second-strike capability-that is, to withstand a first strike and retaliate in kind. Greatly reducing the temptation to go first, this posture would escape the dangerous hair-trigger tenterhooks of the early cold war."

Sean Gonsalves, "The cockroaches are celebrating. U.S. leads way toward new nuclear arms race,"Cape Cod Times, December 8, 2003: "The Energy and Water Appropriations Bill signed by President Bush last week is being celebrated by cockroaches the world over. ... The bill, among other things, provides funding for research in developing nuclear weapons with first-strike capability. ... We are now one step closer to nuclear war and if the path we are following is pursued to its logical conclusion, the Information Age will be followed by a radioactive Cockroach Era."

Libya

"Libya 'not close to nuclear arms'. Libya was not close to producing nuclear weapons, the head of the United Nations nuclear agency has confirmed. Mohamed ElBaradei was speaking at the end of a two-day trip to Libya - the first since the country agreed to give up its weapons drive," BBC/UK, December 29, 2003: "Mr. ElBaradei said the Libyans were being fully co-operative - but there was still 'a lot of work to do'. ... Earlier this month, Libya said it would abandon its aspirations of developing weapons of mass destruction."

Robert D. Kaplan, "When North Korea Falls,"The Atlantic Monthly, October 2006: "The furor over Kim Jong Il's missile tests and nuclear brinksmanship obscures the real threat: the prospect of North Korea’s catastrophic collapse. How the regime ends could determine the balance of power in Asia for decades. The likely winner? China."

Robert Parry, "Bush's Tough-Talkin' Korean Bungle,"Consortium News (AlterNet), October 11, 2006: "In 2002, Bush put North Korea on a list of potential targets for U.S. nuclear weapons. It's no surprise, then, that Kim Jong Il has responded by creating a threat of his own."

2007

David E. Sanger and William J. Broad, "U.S. Had Doubts on North Korean Uranium Drive,"New York Times, March 1, 2007: "The odds look decent, in other words, that the administration effectively let the DPRK build nuclear weapons for absolutely no reason at all other than its generally bad attitude toward diplomatic agreements and 'stuff Bill Clinton did.'"